When Oscar winning composer AR Rahman wanted to quit music forever

The celebrated composer recalls a time, just a month ago, when he was unhappy with the sound of the music he made, and was sure that he wanted to give up making music.

Legendary music composer AR Rahman was pretty gutted after the premier of his film, One Heart, in Dubai, earlier this month. The 50-year-old composer reveals that he was so upset that he had decided to quit the industry altogether.

Music composer AR Rahman is making his directorial debut with the concert film, One Heart.

Speaking to us while promoting his film in Delhi last week, Rahman recalled, “We went to Dubai for the film’s premier. We had spent more than six months in the mixing and production of sound, so we were expecting that to show in the film as well. But we didn’t know that the theatre’s sound system was bad.”

He elaborates, “So when the film played, it sounded horrible. I was like ‘What have I done?’ I thought every theatre (in the world) is going to sound like this. I was so dejected, and I was like, ‘I don’t want to do music anymore. I don’t want to be a filmmaker anymore’, and I just wanted to quit. But then we went to Malaysia next, and there the sound was as it should have been. So I was alright after that.”

Rahman says he was pretty careful when he started making the film and the Oscar winning composer took six years to complete his process of learning. “Filmmaking is not an easy thing, and you can’t just learn the art of filmmaking. It’s a process. There are so many musicians who took big loans, and then it didn’t work of them. Their family got on the streets, and many of them died in extreme poverty. I wanted to be very responsible with it,” he says.

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